Rochelle’s mind was in torment. The blade pressed into Allesandra’s skin, the keen edge drawing blood. All she had to do was press a little harder. Just lean into the woman slightly; the knife would do the rest. Allesandra’s fingers pressed against her own, almost as if the woman were willing her to do this. “My matarh loved Jan,” Rochelle said to her. Her voice trembled more than her hands.
“I know,” Allesandra said. Her lips were slick with blood, and a long thick line drooled down one side of her mouth. “And Jan loved her. I know that too.” Her breath gurgled, and the smell of it was vile. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” Rochelle nearly shouted the word. She almost plunged the knife into her neck with the violence of the word. “You should have said that to her. ”
Allesandra gave no answer. Her breathing had gone thin and slow, and her body jerked once spasmodically. She stared at Rochelle, blinking heavily.
“Rochelle…”
Rochelle lifted the knife away from Allesandra’s neck and sheathed it. Kill her… She heard her matarh’s voice whisper, but the sound was faint, and Rochelle found that she had no will to do it. Not anymore. All the rage had left her, all the certainty.
She didn’t have to do this. She didn’t have to be the White Stone. Matarh had been insane; that didn’t have to be her fate as well.
“I want to watch you die,” she told the Kraljica. She glanced at Sergei. “I need to see it.”
“All right,” Sergei told her. He came ponderously up the steps of the dais to stand next to her. “We’ll watch together.”
Allesandra’s mouth opened, as if she were about to protest, but she said nothing. They heard her breath go out. The Kraljica was looking at Sergei. “Nessantico…” Her voice was hardly more than a zephyr. He eyes were fixed somewhere between the two of them, staring blindly. “Sergei, is she safe?”
“Yes,” Sergei told her. “She’s safe.”
There was no reaction from Allesandra. After a time, they realized that she had not taken in another breath. Her eyes were still open. Rochelle took the white stone from the pouch. She placed it over Allesandra’s right eye. “There, Matarh,” she said. “She’s yours…”
She started down the dais. “Wait,” Sergei called after her. “The stone…”
“Leave it there,” Rochelle told him. “Take it for a memento. Throw it away. I don’t care. I don’t need it.”
She left the hall as the healers-too late-came in.
The wave of cold, then the surge that passed over them harmlessly but slammed into the Westlanders…
Nico’s presence and his voice, impossibly loud…
The silence that seemed to last several breaths, as they realized that none of the Westlanders were casting spells toward them…
What had happened?
Varina could still feel the Scath Cumhacht within herself. She had felt something-someone?-tug at the spells she had stored in her mind as if it wanted to steal them, but the presence had passed by her untouched. Well to the north, she saw a war-teni’s fireball sizzling across the horizon, streaking toward the enemy, then another and yet another, this one from a teni near her. None of them were touched.
She could hear the offiziers shouting, turning the gardai, facing them westward once more. The tide which had pulled them along slowed, stopped, then began to flow the other way. They stood motionless against the current. Leovic and Niels were still holding her arms, but she could see them watching. “Go,” she told them. “They need you. I’ll follow as best I can.”
“A’Morce,” Niels protested.
“Go,” she repeated.
They left her, running toward one of the chevarittai offiziers. She watched them be gathered up in the rush. Then, far more slowly, limping, she followed. Gardai swarmed past her, shouting. She heard the din of the battle renewed ahead of her, but all the spells seemed to be coming from the Faith’s war-teni and the Numetodo, not from the Westlanders.
She was standing among the bodies of those who had fallen in the retreat, most in blue and gold. It was difficult to ignore them. The worst were the ones who were not dead but too wounded to walk, who reached out toward her for succor as she passed or were still crawling toward the city. To them, she could only say that help would be coming soon to rescue them-and hope that she was telling them the truth.
But she was looking for one person in particular.
She saw a body off to her left and ahead of her-dressed in a green teni’s robes. She thought it might be one of the war-teni, then she saw the face.
Nico’s face.
Ignoring her aching legs, she ran to him, sinking down to her knees alongside him. He seemed unharmed: no blood on his robes, his face dirty and dark with old bruises and cuts, but he looked otherwise untouched. “Nico?” she said, rolling him on his back, looking desperately at the robes for a sign of what had hurt him.
He opened his eyes. He smiled. “Hi, Varina. I guess I was sleeping. Have you seen my matarh?” It was a boy’s voice. A child’s voice. He sat up and glanced around, his eyes widening as he took in the gardai running past shouting and waving their swords; the bodies lying nearby; the fumes and smoke of the battlefield; the trampled earth that had once been a farmer’s field. He pushed himself to a sitting position. “Varina,” he said, his voice trembling with obvious fear. He clutched at her arms. “I’m scared, Varina. Take me home. Please. I don’t want to be here.”
“Nico, what did you do?”
He looked frightened at the question, shrinking away from her. “I didn’t do nothing, honest. I just want to go home. I want to see Matarh. I want to see Talis.”
Varina hugged him. “Nico, Talis and Serafina are… gone.”
“Where did they go?” he asked. In his eyes there was no mockery, only the innocent question.
“Nico…” She couldn’t answer him. Varina hugged him again. Whatever Nico had done, however he’d done it, the effort had obviously taken his mind with it. This was no longer the Absolute of the Morellis. This was no longer Nico the great teni. He clung to her like a child to his matarh, and she could feel him shivering with panic and dismay.
Gardai were still flowing past them; the din of battle and the thundering of war-teni spells was deafening. “Nico, come on,” she said. “Let’s get you out of here. It’s not safe. You can come to my house. Would you like that?”
He nodded urgently, clinging to her. She pulled him to his feet.
Together, they stumbled eastward toward the city.
Atl felt naked and unprotected, his spell-staff impossibly emptied in a few breaths by that terrible spell from the east, and now the battle was suddenly renewed when it was supposed to have ended.
In victory. In the victory he’d seen. In the victory he’d told the Tecuhtli would be his. He remembered his taat’s vision, the one Niente claimed to have glimpsed, the path that Atl had been unable to see, the one he’d believed to be his taat’s lie. This was not possible.
Citlali raged at him as fireballs from the Easterner nahualli fell near them. “Stop them!” the Tecuhtli shouted. “Damn you, Nahual! Stop them!”
But all Atl could do was shake his head. “I have no power, Tecuhtli. None of the nahualli have. It’s been taken from us.” The spells were gone, and there was no time now to craft new ones to place in the spell- sticks.
“You promised me victory, Nahual! You promised me the city!” Citlali wailed like a child deprived of his favorite toy, but there was no answer at all to that. His face was so flushed with his anger that the red eagle seemed to blend into his flesh.
There will be no victory, Atl wanted to tell him. Or if there is to be one, it’s not one that I’ve glimpsed in the bowl. The paths in the scrying bowl had been wiped away. Everything had changed. I have never seen this path at all. I don’t know where it leads.
As his taat had warned. His hand felt for his pouch, where the carved bird his taat had given him was nestled. If one of us sees the way, then we can tell the other that the Long Path is open… Could Niente have been right: could this Long Path exist, the one Atl could never see?
He wished Niente were here.
